1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to computer systems. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to determining whether a differential software update to a computer system is valid.
2. Related Art
There are many situations in which a system administrator has to install and/or update a large number of computer systems throughout an enterprise. Typically, this is a time-consuming and repetitive procedure that is either identical or very similar on every system. For example, a server farm may contain hundreds or even thousands of computer systems that will require occasional updates. In this case, the system administrator has to painstakingly update every machine. The update could be a new application program or operating system added to each computer system. Alternatively, it could be a software patch.
Any solution for updating the computer systems must be accurate. One conventional way to perform such an update is to install and configure the new or modified application program or operating system directly onto each computer system. However, this is a very time-consuming process.
A better solution is to copy the entire contents of a system image of a master computer system to the computer systems in need of an update. For example, the new or modified application or operating system is installed and configured on the master computer system. Then, the entire system image from the master machine is copied to each computer system in a file copy procedure. Then each computer system is configured with specific settings needed for this specific computer system. While this is less time consuming than performing an outright install on each computer system, it is still quite time consuming to copy the contents of an entire system image from one computer system to another and can be quite burdensome if the computing environment requires frequent minor updates. When multiplied by a hundred or even a thousand computer systems, the time to perform the updates becomes substantial.
Therefore, a need exists for a method of updating software on computer systems that is not time consuming. The update needs to be suitable for an environment with hundreds or even thousands of computer systems. The method for performing the update must also be accurate.